Opera 101

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Opera 101

Fred Plotkin
Opera 101 Book PDF

Author : Fred Plotkin
Publisher : Hachette Books
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2013-07-16
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781401306007

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Opera 101 by Fred Plotkin Pdf

Opera is the fastest growing of all the performing arts, attracting audiences of all ages who are enthralled by the gorgeous music, vivid drama, and magnificent production values. If you've decided that the time has finally come to learn about opera and discover for yourself what it is about opera that sends your normally reserved friends into states of ecstatic abandon, this is the book for you. Opera 101 is recognized as the standard text in English for anyone who wants to become an opera lover--a clear, friendly, and truly complete handbook to learning how to listen to opera, whether on the radio, on recordings, or live at the opera house. Fred Plotkin, an internationally respected writer and teacher about opera who for many years was performance manager of the Metropolitan Opera, introduces the reader (whatever his or her level of musical knowledge) to all the elements that make up opera, including: A brief, entertaining history of opera; An explanation of key operatic concepts, from vocal types to musical conventions; Hints on the best way to approach the first opera you attend and how to best understand what is happening both offstage and on; Lists of recommended books and recordings, and the most complete traveler's guide to opera houses around the world. The major part of Opera 101 is devoted to an almost minute-by-minute analysis of eleven key operas, ranging from Verdi's thunderous masterpiece Rigoletto and Puccini's electrifying Tosca through works by Mozart, Donizetti, Rossini, Offenbach, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner, to the psychological complexities of Richard Strauss's Elektra. Once you have completed Opera 101, you will be prepared to see and hear any opera you encounter, thanks to this book's unprecedentedly detailed and enjoyable method of revealing the riches of opera.

Opera 101

Fred Plotkin
Opera 101 Book PDF

Author : Fred Plotkin
Publisher : Hyperion
Page : 520 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 1994-12
Category : Music
ISBN : UVA:X002623057

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Opera 101 by Fred Plotkin Pdf

Written by an opera insider and featuring an introduction by Placido Domingo, here is a thorough, friendly, and truly complete guide to learning how to love and appreciate the opera. After a brief history of opera, the book includes a guide to operatic terms, a minute-by-minute listener's guide to 11 central works, a list of recommended books and recordings and much more.

Avidly Reads Opera

Alison Kinney
Avidly Reads Opera Book PDF

Author : Alison Kinney
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 114 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2021-10-12
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781479811762

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Avidly Reads Opera by Alison Kinney Pdf

“Opera is community, comfort, art, voice, breath, life. It’s hope.” All art exists to make life more bearable. For Alison Kinney, it was the wild, fantastical world of opera that transformed her listening and her life. Whether we’re listening for the first time or revisiting the arias that first stole our hearts, Avidly Reads Opera welcomes readers and listeners to a community full of friendship, passion, critique—and, always, beautiful music. In times of delirious, madcap fun and political turmoil, opera fans have expressed their passion by dispatching records into the cosmos, building fairy-tale castles, and singing together through the arduous work of social activism. Avidly Reads Opera is a love letter to the music and those who love it, complete with playlists, a crowdsourced tip sheet from ultra-fans to newbies, and stories of the turbulent, genre-busting, and often hilarious history of opera and its audiences. Across five acts—and the requisite intermission—Alison Kinney takes us everywhere opera’s rich melodies are heard, from the cozy bedrooms of listeners at home, to exclusive music festivals, to protests, and even prisons. Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Opera is an homage to the marvelous, sensational world of opera for the casual viewer.

Classical Music 101

Fred Plotkin
Classical Music 101 Book PDF

Author : Fred Plotkin
Publisher : Hyperion
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2002-09-18
Category : Music
ISBN : 0786886277

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Classical Music 101 by Fred Plotkin Pdf

A Paperback Original. The author who has taught tens of thousands of people to love opera now introduces readers to the rich and soul-stirring world of classical music. For anyone who is aching to discover classical music, this comprehensive and accessible book is the ideal teacher. Writing in the clear and highly entertaining prose that made Opera 101 the standard text in its field, Fred Plotkin -- music expert, teacher, lecturer, and famous author -- presents classical music in a way that respects both the reader and the art form. In Classical Music 101: --The reader will discover how to become an expert listener, which is essential for learning to love classical music. --A thousand years of music are explored, with emphasis on great works in all styles. Significant composers will be profiled in depth, including Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and many more. --Important musicians, such as pianist Emanuel Ax, singer Marilyn Horne, and conductor James Levine, speak about their art in interviews. Classical Music 101, the newest addition to a highly successful series intended for readers who don't consider themselves dummies or idiots, will help the person drawn to the finer things in life (and readers who don't know how to approach them) discover the glories of music.

Singing in Signs

Gregory J. Decker,Matthew R. Shaftel
Singing in Signs Book PDF

Author : Gregory J. Decker,Matthew R. Shaftel
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2020-02-20
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780190620622

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Singing in Signs by Gregory J. Decker,Matthew R. Shaftel Pdf

Singing in Signs: New Semiotic Explorations of Opera offers a bold and refreshing assessment of the state of opera study as seen through the lens of semiotics. At its core, the volume responds to Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker's Analyzing Opera, utilizing a semiotic framework to embrace opera on its own terms and engage all of its constituent elements in interpretation. Chapters in this collection resurrect the larger sense of serious operatic study as a multi-faceted, interpretive discipline, no longer in isolation. Contributors pay particular attention to the musical, dramatic, cultural, and performative in opera and how these modes can create an intertext that informs interpretation. Combining traditional and emerging methodologies, Singing in Signs engages composer-constructed and work-specific music-semiotic systems, broader socio-cultural music codes, and narrative strategies, with implications for performance and staging practices today.

Opera 101

Fred Plotkin,Placido Domingo
Opera 101 Book PDF

Author : Fred Plotkin,Placido Domingo
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 1994
Category : MUSIC
ISBN : 031629148X

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Opera 101 by Fred Plotkin,Placido Domingo Pdf

Written by an opera insider and featuring an introduction by Placido Domingo, here is a thorough, friendly, and truly complete guide to learning how to love and appreciate the opera. After a brief history of opera, the book includes a guide to operatic terms, a minute-by-minute listener's guide to 11 central works, a list of recommended books and recordings and much more.

Opera and Its Symbols

Robert Donington
Opera and Its Symbols Book PDF

Author : Robert Donington
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 1990-01-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 0300056613

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Opera and Its Symbols by Robert Donington Pdf

Explains the use of symbolism in opera, interprets scenes from Monteverdi, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Stravinsky, and Britten, and stresses the importance of staging an opera in accord with the composer's intended use of symbols

The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera

Roger Parker
The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera Book PDF

Author : Roger Parker
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 618 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : History
ISBN : 0192854453

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The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera by Roger Parker Pdf

A historical survey of opera, from its beginnings in Florence 400 years ago, up to opera in the 1990s.

Opera After the Zero Hour

Emily Richmond Pollock
Opera After the Zero Hour Book PDF

Author : Emily Richmond Pollock
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2019-08-20
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780190063757

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Opera After the Zero Hour by Emily Richmond Pollock Pdf

Opera After the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany presents opera as a site for the renegotiation of tradition in a politically fraught era of rebuilding. Though the "Zero Hour" put a rhetorical caesura between National Socialism and postwar West Germany, the postwar era was characterized by significant cultural continuity with the past. With nearly all of the major opera houses destroyed and a complex relationship to the competing ethics of modernism and restoration, opera was a richly contested art form, and the genre's reputed conservatism was remarkably multi-faceted. Author Emily Richmond Pollock explores how composers developed different strategies to make new opera "new" while still deferring to historical conventions, all of which carried cultural resonances of their own. Diverse approaches to operatic tradition are exemplified through five case studies in works by Boris Blacher, Hans Werner Henze, Carl Orff, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and Werner Egk. Each opera alludes to a distinct cultural or musical past, from Greek tragedy to Dada, bel canto to Berg. Pollock's discussions of these pieces draw on source studies, close readings, unpublished correspondence, institutional history, and critical commentary to illuminate the politicized artistic environment that influenced these operas' creation and reception. The result is new insight into how the particular opposition between a conservative genre and the idea of the "Zero Hour" motivated the development of opera's social, aesthetic, and political value after World War II.

A History of Opera

Carolyn Abbate,Roger Parker
A History of Opera Book PDF

Author : Carolyn Abbate,Roger Parker
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 624 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2012-11-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781846147913

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A History of Opera by Carolyn Abbate,Roger Parker Pdf

Opera is in many ways the most extraordinary artistic medium of the last four hundred years. Prohibitively expensive and patently unrealistic, it can nevertheless paint the human passions with astonishing power and drama. This book, the first new, full-length, single-volume history of opera for more than a generation provokes in-depth discussions of many works by the greatest opera composers, from Monteverdi, Handel and Mozart, to Verdi and Wagner, to Strauss, Puccini, Berg, and Britten. There are lively discussions of opera's social, political and literary background, its economic cicumstances and the almost continual polemics that have accompanied its development through the centuries. Central to the book is an exploration of the tensions that have always sustained and enlivened opera. Abbate and Parker examine the problems that opera has faced in the last half century, when new works - which were once opera's life-blood - have shrunk to a tiny minority, have largely failed to find a permanent place in the repertoire. Yet the book's final message is one of celebration. Even if the majority of opera's most popular and enduring works were written in what is now a remote European past, in circumstances very different from our own, and the viability of contemporary opera is ever more in question, opera as an art form remains extraordinarily buoyant and challenging. It continues to transform people physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and to articulate human experience in ways no other art form can match.

A Habit of Handel

Francis Reid
A Habit of Handel Book PDF

Author : Francis Reid
Publisher : Lulu.com
Page : 142 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2012-10-23
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9781291134858

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A Habit of Handel by Francis Reid Pdf

This is the story of a love affair with the music of George Frederic Handel.It records a half-century of pursuing performances across Europe in a spirit of pure hedonism .... including 70 different baroque operas and 35 oratorios in 75 cities.The great Handel Festivals in Göttingen, Halle, Karlsuhe and London are visited as are the major opera houses and concert halls plus civic theatres, large, fringe and digital.Handel is placed in his baroque context by accounts of performances of opera and music by his contemporaries.This not a critical work. The author loves his subject much too much for tha

Bravo! Brava! A Night at the Opera

Anne Siberell
Bravo Brava A Night at the Opera Book PDF

Author : Anne Siberell
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 64 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2002-01-03
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 9780190286149

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Bravo! Brava! A Night at the Opera by Anne Siberell Pdf

A delightful introduction to opera, Bravo! Brava! A Night at the Opera teaches elementary school children what opera is by showing how it is made. "Who writes the words?", "Who makes an opera happen? "Who is backstage?"--these questions and more are answered with easy-to-understand explanations and are illustrated with whimsical watercolors by the author. From composer, choreographer, and costume designers to the conductor, lighting and special effects crew, and, of course, the singers, the excitement builds as Anne Siberell explains each person's role in producing an opera. Bravo! Brava! A Night at the Opera reveals details of the most famous operas' plots and characters along the way and includes synopses of 27 popular operas, a glossary, suggestions for further reading, and an index.

Who's Afraid of Opera?

Michael Walsh
Who s Afraid of Opera Book PDF

Author : Michael Walsh
Publisher : Diversion Books
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2015-08-04
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781626819665

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Who's Afraid of Opera? by Michael Walsh Pdf

For anyone who has been intimidated, overwhelmed, or just plain confused by what they think opera is, WHO’S AFRAID OF OPERA? offers a lively, readable guide to what author Michael Walsh describes as "the greatest art form yet invented by humankind." From opera's origins in Renaissance Italy to The Who's rock odyssey “Tommy” and Stephen Sondheim's “Into the Woods,” Walsh explores what opera is and what it's not, what makes a great singer, and why it takes Tristan so long to die. So curtain up! It's time to settle into your seat, close up your program, and watch the house lights go down. And get ready for the musical ride of your lives.

Ticket to the Opera

Phil G. Goulding
Ticket to the Opera Book PDF

Author : Phil G. Goulding
Publisher : Ballantine Books
Page : 720 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2011-03-30
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780307761842

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Ticket to the Opera by Phil G. Goulding Pdf

In Ticket to the Opera, Phil G. Goulding finally makes the magic and mystique of opera accessible to all. Here he offers a complete operatic education, including history, definitions of key musical terms, opera lore and gossip, portraits of famous singers and the roles they immortalized, as well as pithy introductions to the greatest operas of Europe and America and their composers. The book's centerpiece is what Goulding terms "the collection"--85 classics, among them Aida, The Marriage of Figaro, Carmen, and Madama Butterfly, that have been packing the world's opera houses for years. This entertaining, meticulously researched book also includes a fascinating chapter on American opera from George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess to Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach and a discussion of the gems of twentieth-century opera featuring works like Leos Janácek's The Cunning Little Vixen, Alban Berg's Lulu, and Serge Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges. Whether you're a curious neophyte, a music lover interested in branching out, or an aficionado eager to compare notes with a brilliant fellow opera buff, you'll prize Ticket to the Opera as an essential volume in your music library.

Bewitching Russian Opera

Inna Naroditskaya
Bewitching Russian Opera Book PDF

Author : Inna Naroditskaya
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2018-11-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780190931865

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Bewitching Russian Opera by Inna Naroditskaya Pdf

In Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage, author Inna Naroditskaya investigates the musical lives of four female monarchs who ruled Russia for most of the eighteenth century: Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great. Engaging with ethnomusicological, historical, and philological approaches, her study traces the tsarinas' deeply invested interest in musical drama, as each built theaters, established drama schools, commissioned operas and ballets, and themselves wrote and produced musical plays. Naroditskaya examines the creative output of the tsarinas across the contexts in which they worked and lived, revealing significant connections between their personal creative aspirations and contemporary musical-theatrical practices, and the political and state affairs conducted during their reigns. Through contemporary performance theory, she demonstrates how the opportunity for role-playing and costume-changing in performative spaces allowed individuals to cross otherwise rigid boundaries of class and gender. A close look at a series of operas and musical theater productions--from Catherine the Great's fairy tale operas to Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame--illuminates the transition of these royal women from powerful political and cultural figures during their own reigns, to a marginalized and unreal Other under the patriarchal dominance of the subsequent period. These tsarinas successfully fostered the concept of a modern nation and collective national identity, only to then have their power and influence undone in Russian cultural consciousness through the fairy-tales operas of the 19th century that positioned tsarinas as "magical" and dangerous figures rightfully displaced and conquered--by triumphant heroes on the stage, and by the new patriarchal rulers in the state. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the theater served as an experimental space for these imperial women, in which they rehearsed, probed, and formulated gender and class roles, and performed on the musical stage political ambitions and international conquests which they would later enact on the world stage itself.